I would like to see the development of an app that allows me to "live boot" from an iso that I have downloaded to my HDD.

If I could trial that iso before I burnt it to CD it would stop me making so many coasters...

I guess the app would be running some sort of "virtual" environment and then booting into it?? If the iso was not suitable for my hardware I could then (possibly) drop back out of it with no harm done. (Maybe the virtual host app would have a default timeout that would "take back" control from the new iso if no valid activity was observed within a set timeframe).

An app would be like VBox pet from the repo for puppy.
There are several that have VBox. use search machine in the link in my signature.

But that require you have enough memory to have two going at same time. The Host which is Puppy and the Guest that is the iso you test.

It sure works but suppose you have 1GB then only 500 to each?
not that good.

another way is this Frugal boot of isos. Seems to work best with
puppy. Then Slax variations like Porteus and CDLinux and Parted Magic
and TinyCore 4.x The Department of Defence secure light weight one
works good too.

Then Ubuntu iso many many variations works good. Debian is problematic. Arch only archiso by Godane works but don't allow writing
the the NTFS. Slitaz has problem saving.

I fail to boot variations of Suse and Fedora and Mandrake.
I fail to boot BDS variations too. But anything Ubuntu except
maybe one out of 20 or so. look further down in long post.

Ooops one use puppy to mount the iso by clicking on it and then copy the dirs out to a subdir with same name as the iso see example.
Beware that the preseed need to ahve right name. ubuntu or mint or custom or ... see examples below.

I have ideas but all depends on your exact needs.

Some isos do boot in Grub4dos and puppy have that built in.
grub4dosconfig can set up that one on a partition or on a USB.
Then you can use code on the usb that do boots iso files in
live mode. you can not save changes but you are in a kind of
pretend CD mode using map and hook and loop and such codes.

Another option that works for all ubuntu derivates is to do
simplified iso booting on your NTFS hdd. if you have an ext2 or ext3
partition free to experiment on then many even Debian work but
I have none such? on my regular computer. I do have on the Asus
but that one is so new to me so not motivated to do hours of tests
just to satisfy you now.

Here is a starter that allow you test some 95% of all variations of Ubuntu.
I give example for a few.

I would like to see the development of an app that allows me to "live boot" from an iso that I have downloaded to my HDD.

If I could trial that iso before I burnt it to CD it would stop me making so many coasters...

I guess the app would be running some sort of "virtual" environment and then booting into it?? If the iso was not suitable for my hardware I could then (possibly) drop back out of it with no harm done. (Maybe the virtual host app would have a default timeout that would "take back" control from the new iso if no valid activity was observed within a set timeframe).

Hope someone knows what I mean.

Thx

One app is virtualbox
The other is grub or grub4dos

We do not burn CDs

Nooby knows what you mean and has given good advice
And if you had posted specs of your computer he could have kept it shorter

This tool is useful in booting the ISO on a real PC or on a Virtual PC. This tool works regardless whether you want to boot a 32bit or a 64bit PUP on some PC; again, real or virtual.

In simple language, you

add it to one of your running Puppy PC, then

go to ANY other PC on your LAN, and boot it.

You can select/interchange/mix/combine as many Puppy ISOs that you would/could want. There is no other requirements of real or virtual products to use it. It just works!

Any feedback you have, please post it there. The setup instructions was written, months ago, to make it easy for ANYONE. If its not easy or you have suggestions for the manual, please offer it.

Hope this helps_________________Get ACTIVE Create Circles; Do those good things which benefit people's needs!
We are all related ... Its time to show that we know this!
3 Different Puppy Search Engineor use DogPile

Maybe this would not work, but how about using something like a net boot of the ISO?
It would work like you would select the ISO from the download site to boot to.
That ISO would get booted into memory without even having to download the ISO.
Possible?

Remember though that one would run the risk of giving an ISO permission to boot on your PC and hopefully not be redirected to a nasty.

It looks like the "mount iso and build frugal folders" is a good option for me to avoid wasting CDs. At this stage I'm sticking with Puppy frugals only, for the sake of simplicity.

And the Vbox method sounds like it will allow a trial of the new iso without rebooting? But at the expense of needing a lot of memory? Most of my machines have only 256 or 512mb, so that sounds problematic but I will try it anyway. Sounds like what I was looking for.

I will have a closer look again after work. cheers

EDIT: I'm still hoping to be able to use an automated method of mounting the iso and copying the necessary contents out of the iso and building the frugal folder and menu.lst entry. More trials to come later.Last edited by greengeek on Mon 26 Mar 2012, 14:42; edited 1 time in total

L18L.. Oh yeah, sorry... the machine I will try this on is a Tosh TE2100 2Ghz machine with 512mb, but I have Puppy installed on about 15 other machines aswell, with lesser specs.

Probly will have to stick to CD boots for those other machines.

GCMartin... The netbooting sounds interesting, although I don't yet share my machines across the network. I like to keep everything separate. Do you think it would be possible to boot a machine from itself using this sort of method? ie: use the lo port (127.x.x.x) to get the PXE data from itself (192.168.x.x), then boot to that iso?

Sorry if this reveals my ignorance - In my mind everything is possible until reality steps in and proves the opposite.

Although maybe one method might be to keep a single Puppy CD in the drive as a boot device, and load different isos to the usb stick ready for the CD boot to find? Have you tried anything like that? Maybe it is possible to extract a file from the iso (maybe an sfs?) and have that on the stick.

... Do you think it would be possible to boot a machine from itself using this sort of method? ie: use the lo port (127.x.x.x) to get the PXE data from itself (192.168.x.x), then boot to that iso? ... .

Not an ignorant question. Without getting too detailed, this is only possible when using your PC as a VM host and having a VM client which is set up to PXE (find a place to boot from). Then, the VM client would boot your ISO and you would have both your main PC (host) running and you client (ISO0 running at the same time. This presents itself as if there were 2 independent PCs. For a lengthier discussion PM me and I'll walk you thru an simple discussion if this is what you want to do.

Nooby wrote:

Setting up a server is not an easy thing. Servers are the most exploited computer thing on earth. I will not do it!

This outburst is a little disturbing. Every techie knows that if one machine shares something with another machine, that is a "server". And the ability to share something is NOT a difficulty or something we should run away from.

I think you are trying to, either, confuse/discourage unnecessarily with that kind of comment..

Nooby, if for some reason you were unable to get a PC to boot on your home network, you, too, can PM me and I, personally, will walk you thru how the manual explains to do this. Its very easy if your PCs are on your LAN connected to your router. Its really very easy and I do mean EASY ! (Nooby, if its a language thing that confusing you, I'm sure between you and I we can create a translation in your language.)

Hope this helps_________________Get ACTIVE Create Circles; Do those good things which benefit people's needs!
We are all related ... Its time to show that we know this!
3 Different Puppy Search Engineor use DogPile

Maybe this would not work, but how about using something like a net boot of the ISO?
It would work like you would select the ISO from the download site to boot to.
That ISO would get booted into memory without even having to download the ISO.
Possible?

Interesting idea. So you mean basically a PXE load across the internet? I am too new to this to know if such a thing might work, but it raises the question about how much data of that iso has to cross the network to enable the boot. ie: the whole 100+ mb or just a fraction of it?

I need to get PXE going on my home network first, to help me overcome the ignorance factor.
cheers

I have a small (16M is more than enough) bootable partion containing grub on every device (1 hardisk, several USB sticks, no CD).

Thus you could try frugal installs without burning a CD

So do you mean that your boot partition is just big enough for grub, and that the remainder of the frugal files live on the usb sticks? So you just use the hard drive as a boot device only? Or did you mean that each usb stick also has grub on it, requiring the PC to support boot_from_usb?
thx

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